Alternative
by R. Daneel Olivaw
Summary: bleak, barely uses any TSCC characters directly.    Shattered physically and emotionally, a tech contemplates the fate of worlds in flux.


Robert Culliver was not getting used to the pain. The angry woman at the dispensary told him that he would eventually. She also told him that the narcotics there were in short supply, and that there were people who really needed them. Culliver judged by the hollowed out look of her, that she may consider herself one of those people.

He ground his teeth and rubbed the stumps where his legs ended, just above the knees. Gripping the wheels of his chair, he rolled himself down the concrete hallway toward his shop. He thought again about the woman he had just left. Andrea was her name, pale as a ghost with red blotches on her skin. Nobody seemed to be her boss; she just made her own rules in there. Organization was going to hell these days.

Lots of things were going to hell these days. The whole world was hell most of the time. The air was bad, everything tasted like shit, everyone he talked to was pissed off and there were days when he swore his legs were back, but they were made of fire. But the worst thing, the thing that made life truly unbearable, was that there was no one he could tell it too. Nobody was left that cared enough about him, or didn't have enough of their own problems, to listen to him vent, to commiserate with him.

He thought of his younger brother, David. He had been the fun one, the football player, big Cully they called him. Robert himself had been more serious, bookish, a bit of an introvert. They had drifted apart during the college years, Cully going to frat parties and tailgating, Robert playing video games with his engineering classmates. After the shit hit the fan, all they had was each other. At that time they bonded more closely than even brothers usually do, and they pulled each other through some serious shit. Robert had run into some concertina wire and cut his legs up pretty badly. After three days the infection had gotten so bad that he couldn't walk. Cully had carried him for almost a week. By the time they hooked up with the resistance, the gangrene had gotten so bad that amputation was the only option.

That's when they got split up again too. Robert, with his PhD in electronic engineering, and stumps where his legs had been, had gotten sent here to the dam. Cully, being able bodied, was put in the infantry and shipped to the front lines. Weeks had gone by with no word at all from him. Then the message came through that Cully and his friend Bird were in a bunker when one of General Connor's chipwashed death machines had gone haywire. The resistance had to abandon the bunker; they couldn't even bring back the body.

"Culliver. Hey, Culliver."

His face was hot and wet. He just realized his chair had banged into the wall and he was crying.

"Culliver, pull yourself together, soldier."

He wiped his eyes and tried to see who was speaking to him. He couldn't seem to get his face under control, and his nose was running with snot. Looking up, he saw a thin, dark skinned man in fatigues, gold braids on a black cap, and a thinly disguised look of disgust on his face. Captain Patel, Officer in Charge of the Grand Coulee Dam Resistance Base. Lean and hawkish, Patel spoke to everyone as if Judgment Day had been their own personal fault.

"What are you doing here Culliver? Where are you coming from?"

Robert could not even stand up in front of him. It was humiliating. "I went to the dispensary captain. I was trying to get something for the pain." Culliver could tell by the shift in Patel's expression that he thought that was why he had been crying.

Patel's eyes narrowed. "You're going to have to toughen up Culliver. We need you in the tech lab, and we need you to be sharp. We have a lot going on, and people are relying on you. Lots of soldiers are wounded right now, and they don't all get their own private chair. You need to show some gratitude, and some intestinal fortitude, and get back on the ball." When he said the word 'sharp' Robert thought he could see every one of Patel's white teeth against his dark face.

Robert knuckled his eyes, now dry, even gritty, but still hot. His grief had slid back under the mask he wore in these hallways, back among the other emotions. Anger. Shame. "Right, captain. I'm on my way down there now. I'm making some headway, and I'll have a report for you soon."

Patel didn't seem to notice the disdain that had crept into Culliver's voice. "Don't leave the lab until I get back to you. We have some people coming tonight that you need to be there for. Carry on." Robert wheeled around and continued rolling down the hall. Patel watched him for a few long seconds before turning and pacing off the other way.

Culliver reached a point where the hallway became an open walkway across the face of the dam. Two hundred feet in the open he had to cross, and it was raining again. It had been raining like this for weeks. Black piss falling from the sky, staining the walls of the dam with soot. Probably toxic too, he thought as he rolled through it. His hands turned slippery from the black slime the wheels of his chair were picking up. He had to be careful, as some sections of the safety rail were in bad repair, and it was a long plunge down to the Columbia River below. By the time he reached the other end of the walkway, he was soaked and freezing.

Just down the hall was the door to what Patel had called 'the tech lab'. It was a converted storage area made entirely of concrete that had lockers, workbenches and power cables bolted to the walls. Inside were his two main projects, one of which stared at him from across the room with baleful red lenses. It was the upper half of a T888 terminator robot that had been captured after it got stuck underneath an Abrams tank. Its arms were bolted to the concrete floor and its legs had been removed, but its head swiveled to follow his motion around the room. The thing was here so that Robert could use it to practice Gen. Connor's famous chip scrubbing technique, but he was having little luck at it. Baffled by the functions of the robot's neural net processor, he marveled at the fact that Connor had discovered how to reprogram these things at all.

His other project was a completely different piece of captured technology, a TDE, or Time Displacement Equipment. In his opinion this was Skynet's most amazing advancement. An actual time machine, capable of transporting things into the future, or the past. On this he had been making considerable progress, having intuitively grasped the concepts involved. He would prefer to work on this project alone; it was the only thing that distracted him from his miserable surroundings, his aching stumps and the dark hole inside him when he thought of his brother. His part in the project was to try to defeat a limitation of the equipment, that it could only transport living matter for some reason. Both the resistance and its enemy had transported soldiers to the past, fearless of the grandfather paradox, to try to alter the course of fate to their advantage. Each time they had had to arrive naked, and empty handed. The first faction to be able to transport materiel would gain a major tactical advantage.

Culliver's theory was that kyrlian fields where necessary for an object to enter the chronostream, and he had almost completed a device that would replicate those fields. While optimistic about its chance of success, he doubted that it would do anyone in the present world any good. Since the discovery of the TDE the theories and implications had been discussed to death, and none of the more plausible theories seemed to indicate a change in the current time. Were they going through all this just to save a world they would never know? A world they possibly created with their meddling? Robert had thought long and hard on what that meant.

He had full access to the TDE. He had contemplated sending himself back, to a time when he and his brother were still whole and healthy. That fantasy was flawed by the fact that he would arrive as is, a shell shocked invalid. The alternate selves of he and his brother would be appalled by his appearance, perhaps wouldn't even recognize him. He would never be able to convince them of what their future held. No, the TDE was not going to fix his world. He wasn't sure if the recent past was even worth saving, if there were any way to stop the world from heading to its self destruction.

He opened up a few wall lockers, spread tools out on the bench, and spent the next four hours totally immersed in the project. While he was working, he could shut out anything, from a crushing sense of loss, to the malevolent stare of the creature in the corner. He rolled back and forth across the bench, laying out parts, soldering, spot welding, calculating, and testing. He finished up by bolting his Kyrlian field projector to an adjustable arm and cranking it into position. He was sure that he was now able to send non organic materiel into the chronostream.

Culliver next went to a control box mounted on the wall. A group of levers and joysticks operated hoisting equipment and a powerful electromagnet mounted in the ceiling. One thing Grand Coulee Base had plenty of, was electrical power. He positioned the magnet over the T888 and powered it on. The metallic parts of the creature stuck fast to the magnet, while the fields wreaked havoc with its servos, effectively immobilizing it. Robert slid down from his chair, since he couldn't approach the magnet in it, the chair being mostly metal. He crawled over to the immobilized monster. Using an aluminum lever, he pried the control chip from its socket in the metal skull. The glowing eyes dimmed, movement ceased. He put the control chip in his shirt pocket.

Crawling back, he slowly and painfully climbed back into his chair. This was a somewhat clumsy and brutal ordeal that had him backing the chair up to a wall and using the bench top to pull himself up. Twice he unconsciously put weight on his stumps, and the electric-like shocks of pain caused his eyes to water up again. When he finally regained his seat, the pain ebbed away in the face of the next step.

He powered off the big magnet, and what was once a killing machine fell to the floor like a pile of iron bars. He pushed a few more levers, and the magnet that had held the thing in place rolled back to his side of the room. A few more flicks, and an electric winch slid across the ceiling behind the creature. For just a moment, he thought of the hours that he had spent playing video games and how that applied to what he was doing now. Culliver threw the switch that powered a compressor, plugged an airline into it and pulled a pneumatic impact wrench from a tool case. Rolling back over to the T888, he used the air-wrench to unbolt its arms from the floor. He held the yellow button on the winch control to feed out its steel cable, and wrapped it around the 'spine' of the robot. He used the same bolts that had held its arms to the floor to secure that cable in place. Out of habit, he switched off the compressor, unhooked the impact wrench, and replaced it and its air hose in the tool locker.

Sweating, covered with black slime from the rain and suddenly itchy, Robert now realized that most of the physical and mental work was already done. He had a moment to think about what he was about to do. He thought about why he had chosen this particular point in time. It seemed a turning point to him, a moment in history when technology was producing new instruments of death at an alarming rate. He thought that perhaps this may just be the sign to people to think about where they were headed. They may just make a few different choices; maybe there future could be saved. He thought about the fate of other worlds, and who had the right to decide that fate. Robert Culliver was not a man of immense ego, but as an alternative to Sanjay Patel, did he think he was more qualified? He could only guess.

Driving thoughts of Cpt. Patel and his Brother David from his mind, he once more worked up his resolve. He punched in settings to the TDE, and synchronized the Kyrlian projector to it. He mapped the focal point, and rotated all arms of the device to its length. He routed power to the device, and fired the switch forward to warm up its projectors. Rolling back to the T888, he pulled its control chip from his pocket. He placed it back into its socket. According to the manuals, it took 30 seconds for the beast to reboot. Culliver spent this time back pedaling his chair to where he could work both the TDE controls and the electric winch.

Now he watched. He had meant to use a stopwatch here, if this was the only detail he forgot, it was ok. The T888 started to awaken. It took in the whole room. Its gaze stopped at Robert, and his bank of controls. Focusing, it began to claw its way toward him. As it did, Robert played the steel cable out, giving it ground. It pulled itself forward, seeking to eliminate him and usurp his control panel. When it reached the center of the room Robert threw the power switch on the TDE, activating it. The projectors all hummed to life. A blue sphere started to coalesce around the bot. It seemed to understand the significance and stopped fighting the cable. It started to gesture toward Culliver, but the significance was lost in the crackle and boom of a sudden explosion.

Culliver was burned. His eyes stung, but they worked when he opened them. The room was filled with smoke. The robot was gone, a bowl shaped depression remained in the floor where the TDE field had extended into it. His experiment had worked, but the concrete at the edge of the field must have vaporized, causing the explosion. His chair still worked, and he rolled out of the room into the hallway. His charred hands stung on the wheels.

He rolled up the hall, toward the walkway over the dam. He saw Cpt. Patel approaching, accompanied by two others, an intense looking Asian woman and a frightened blond, no more than a girl really.

"Culliver, what the hell happened to you? Where are you going?" Patel barked.

"Accident captain," He said "Got something I have to do."

"Dammit, if you're not back here ASAP, you are in deep."

"Right you are captain."

Culliver thought of technology and weaponry as he rolled out onto the walkway. The black rain had started again. He thought of war and brotherhood and the value of life. He thought about the T888 appearing suddenly on the battlefield at Bull Run in Virginia, on a sunny July day in 1861. He wondered if it would attack the union forces first, or the confederates, and would they join forces against it? He thought of all these things as himself and his chair pitched off the broken walkway into the cold black water below. And he thought about his brother David.

Robert Culliver had never gotten used to the pain.

Fin


End file.
